The power in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle: Brünnhilde must suffer to save the world

On Sunday at Brattleboro’s Latchis Theatre, Vermont’s first-ever Wagner “Ring” Cycle came to a close with “Gotterdammerung,” or “Twilight of the Gods.” At its center is Brunnhilde,” a goddess and Valkyrie forced to become human a face human love — and she must save the world.

“I don’t think Brünnhilde is one person,” says soprano Jenna Rae who sang the role.

“It’s really fun to be able to do the whole ‘Ring’ because she actually gets a character arc by the time you get to the end,” she said. “You know, she starts off as Daddy’s girl and she has fun, and she just does her thing and she probably doesn’t think that much about things.

“And then, when she decides to grow up a little and stand up for what she thinks is right, it gets hard for her,” Rae said. “It’s classic teenager, like now I’m going to bump up against the parents and create my own identity.”

Brünnhilde’s coming of age story happens over the three final operas — “Das Rheingold (Rhine Gold),” “Die Valkyrie (The Valkyrie)” and “Götterdämmerung.”

“That’s the human part of her — not that she technically is any but human,” Rae said. “She’s Wotan’s daughter, but she’s also Erda’s daughter and Erda is the Earth mother and wise and just knows things, and Brünnhilde has a little bit of that. She goes from not knowing through to the end where she knows what she has to do.”

TUNDI Productions performed the four operas of Richard Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelung,” conducted and directed by Hugh Keelan, Aug. 18-24 at the Latchis Theatre.

TUNDI Productions debuted at the Latchis in 2019 with Wagner’s most popular opera “Tristan und Isolde.” (TUNDI with is a contraction of the opera’s title.) A family affair, Rae sang Isolde with husband Keelan conducting. After a two-year COVID hiatus, they started presenting individual operas from the “Ring” each August, with ever-growing audiences.

Becoming Brünnhilde
Singing Brünnhilde is as complex as the character herself.

“It’s very different singing each of the three operas,” Rae said. “So in ‘Valkyrie,’ you have to start with ‘Hahei! Hahei! Heiaho!’ You’re starting right off with this kind of bombastic, really vocally challenging, very high, bouncing all around, thing.

“So she is, at least the way I play her, very energetic, and she’s engaged in a way that I find the Valkyrie Brünhilde the most challenging to sing,” Rae said. “And the ending is so hard because you’re just singing high, high, high, high, high, high, and you’re hanging out up there — and it’s, it’s very tiring.”

Wagner took a break and wrote “Tristan” before he wrote “Siegfried,” and his approach to writing for soprano changed.

“I think he learned something about giving us a little bit of a rest when we are going to need it,” Rae said. “So then you get to the ‘Siegfried’ finale, which is just beautiful, it doesn’t sit very high.

“It kind of sits middle high,” she said. “Lighter voices can sing it because it doesn’t have a lot of the low notes. And you’re only singing, you’re only on stage for 45 minutes at the end of the opera, so it’s not super taxing.”

And then you get to “Götterdämmerung.”

“You’ve got all of the low and you’ve got some of the high,” Rae said. “It’s a creamier singing than you had when you started in ‘Valkyrie,’ where it’s kind of angular, and then you get this gorgeous lyrical beautiful singing — so it feels very different.”

The soprano must also take Brünnhilde’s emotional ride.

“Like growing up, like when you’re, when you’re a teenager, and everything feels so big?” Rae said. “When you’re doing ‘Valkyrie,’ she’s high, she’s low, she’s really at the extremes of things. And then as you go through, you become more adult about it and you have those slower, deeper emotions, like real love and real pain.

“There’s a lifetime of experience,” Rae said. “She’s a mature person at the end. She’s figured out something about who she is in the world, and how grief has to work, and how love has to work. It’s a pretty tough role.”

And it certainly can be exhausting, but that’s not Rae’s problem.

“Singing this feeds me, so I’ll be exhausted afterwards,” she said. “I have a reputation for falling asleep at the cast parties after. But actually, doing it just energizes me — so it does not feel hard to do it. I really love doing this. It’s fun.”

Rae’s first experience with Wagner began with working on Isolde in 2017.

“I worked on it for two years,” she said. “When I first started learning it, I couldn’t even make it through the ‘Liebestod.’ It was just too much. I did not have the body.

“But somehow I just knew that I could do it.”

And she did.

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